Archivist’s Note-Marker (Epic, Charge 1)

  +6 Mana, +2 Body, +4 Awareness

  The pen’s user can inscribe a note onto a creation or magical item once per Phase, changing a single word in its description. This effect can change an item’s function, but may also result in the item becoming unstable and overloading, in the item’s costs increasing, or in other unintended consequences.

  Tori handed me my loot quietly. The pen was interesting; it looked like a brass-nibbed pen on its surface, but the magic—or the components—inside suggested it was more than capable of performing its task. I stared at it, thinking back to the device in the depths of the Whole New World.

  “So, did you figure it out?” Tori asked.

  I shook my head, but didn’t say anything.

  “But you managed to kill the dungeon?”

  “Looks that way.”

  We stared at the Discovery World building as it slowly came apart at the seams. Five minutes after the timer had started—and a whole forty-seven seconds after we met at the door and walked out—Charge had started leaking from cracks in the dungeon’s shell. The concrete and steel building had begun to decay, and its materials seemed to corrode wherever the Charge touched. In its place, a gray fog wall grew, filling the gaps.

  “It’s like in some real-time strategy games, where you have to disassemble a building instead of just blowing it up to clear a place for a new one,” Tori said. She was still quiet. I didn’t press her; if she wanted to talk about whatever was on her mind, she would. “Weird to see here, though. Think this is how the terraforming was, but in reverse?”

  “Nope,” Calvin said. “That was instant, or pretty much instant, and it didn’t change the outside of too much—just sealed off buildings and rearranged the city’s underbelly. This is different. I doubt the Consortium planned for it. They ain’t the kind of things that fall apart on their own, dungeons.”

  I nodded slowly. “No, they aren’t. How about we get moving, and I’ll tell you what I found on the way? Green Bay’s a long drive, and it’s also our last shot at a Waypoint for Museumtown.”

  Tori turned, making sure to keep her face angled away from me, but I still caught orange light glinting off her tears as she did. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  “So, you’re saying you killed the dungeon?” Tori asked after I finished my explanation.

  Calvin rolled his eyes—and almost rolled the Runner as we chugged up Interstate 43. “That ain’t the takeaway, Tori. Hal’s saying he thinks the Consortium’s, what? Grinding up dead spirits or something, using them to power Integration?”

  I didn’t respond right away. Truthfully, I wanted to vomit. We were all making a lot of assumptions, and I hadn’t had time to learn more. The World Engine, or whatever that thing had been, hadn’t had time to tell me more. That was fine. What it had told me was plenty.

  The Consortium had to know. They had to. And if they didn’t, someone in the Universal Order did.

  “I…don’t think it’s spirits,” I repeated. I’d already told them all of this, of course. We’d been driving for almost half an hour, with at least three more before Green Bay. The sun was starting to come down, reflecting off Lake Michigan in a brilliant golden-red glow. And I was tired. “The machine said it was life force.”

  “But you saw that Collins woman’s face,” Calvin said. “Sounds like it’s god damn souls to me.”

  For a long time, the Runner was quiet. Then Tori cleared her throat. “Does it matter whether it’s souls, spirits, or life force? I mean, really matter? I bet if you slowed down all the faces, we’d recognize a few. Tommy, Brian, Eddie, Saul. They all died, just like Leana Collins did. They’re fueling your class.”

  I balled a fist and tried to breathe. That was it. The thing I’d neglected to tell them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It had been that, the moment I said it, I’d have to deal with it.

  Apparently, just hearing it was enough, though.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The Runner kept moving. Charge flowed through the Heart, and the grenade thrower overhead wobbled on its mount. I tried not to think about it.

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” Tori asked.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  A pair of shallow breaths. Neither of them helped, and I tried to force myself to breathe in and out a few more times.

  Then I nodded slowly and turned in my seat. “It does. I need to talk to the World Engine again—if it’s even possible. I’d assume every dungeon has a…I don’t know, a service area? But accessing them sounds just about impossible. We only found that one because Calvin noticed a few funny words at the end of a blurb on Integration management.

  “Until I know more about it, though, I have to keep using what I’ve got. Voltsmith is the only class I have. I have to use Charge to make it work, and I can’t stop. Too many people are depending on me,” I said.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Calvin asked.

  I shrugged. “I think we stick with the plan we had. We tried Milwaukee. It’s a bust. But Green Bay might not be. We’ll go there, talk to the locals, and—“

  “See if Mom’s okay?” Tori asked.

  “Yes, we’ll see if your mother’s alright. Keep going, Hal.” Calvin jerked the Patrol Runner around a hole where some construction wouldn’t ever get finished.

  “Right. We go there, talk to the locals, and see if there’s a chance we can get a Waypoint Beacon for our people. And if not, we figure out a solution that works for as many people as we can save.”

  Tori didn’t say anything. I paused, then kept going. “I don’t think it’ll come to that, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” I said. I couldn’t explain it. Everything I’d already told them was bad enough.

  But the tiny, burnt-out device in my pocket—I couldn’t risk putting it into my inventory in case the Consortium could see it there—weighed on me even more than everything I’d learned. I’d taken it from the secret room below the dungeon. It was the projector-thing.

  If I could fix it, provide it with the power to run, and find a place to run it away from prying eyes, there was a good chance I’d be able to talk to the World Engine—or whatever the faces had been—again. It’d be tough. It wouldn’t be tonight, or even tomorrow. But the next time I was back at the Voltsmith’s Laboratory, I was going to give it a go.

  By the time we pulled into Green Bay almost four hours later, it was dark, and Tori was asleep. Calvin hadn’t said a word to me the whole time, and he looked exhausted, but he kept the Runner’s speed up as we drove into the city.

  “Sign says there’s another kids’ museum here,” Calvin said quietly. “You gonna take another shot at it?”

  “No.” I pointed at the buildings. “Notice anything?”

  “Nope,” Calvin said. “Looks like a normal-ass view of Green Bay. What a shithole. Worst place I ever wintered.”

  “A normal-ass view, Calvin.” I pointed at the glass-and-concrete buildings, and the steel—and even the traffic lights. There were dirt patches in the streets, but somehow, not a single building had Grafted.

  He stared. Then he cleared his throat. “Oh. I gotcha.”

  “Yeah. Let’s find the people who beat Solemnus Six and see what they’re about. Maybe I’ll get some smithing done while we’re there. And while we’re at it, let’s find Tori’s mom.”

  The alarm stopped when Voril was halfway to Milwaukee.

  She stared at the view from her pod, then opened it and descended into the bramble-choked city. It looked nothing like the briefing images had showed it; Solemnus Six had taken over. Orcs watched her from the brush. The Integration manager ignored them. If they’d ever been a threat to her, those days had passed centuries ago.

  A dungeon had been damaged. That in itself was normal; dungeons were, after all, built for combat. But to be damaged to the point where an alert went out was highly unusual. This was only Voril’s third dungeon emergency in her career.

  And it was the first that had shut off its own alarm.

  Voril searched methodically, but quickly. She quickly ruled out the downtown area, then flew down the streets, soaring over the road-clogging flora and heading for the waterfront.

  And that was when she saw it.

  A Tier Two dungeon. A Whole New World. Or at least its outline—it was nothing but the same gray fog dungeons used to delineate boss doors and lock people out of resetting ones. She could clearly see its every shape reflected in the fog, but the dungeon itself was…gone.

  What could kill a dungeon? The seeds were supposed to be immortal representations of their creator’s will, not something that could be destroyed like this. It didn’t make sense.

  Voril watched the dungeon’s fog wall as it thinned, then collapsed. When it was gone, there was nothing except for a Whole New World-sized hole in the waterfront that the lake quickly filled in, lined with steel and stone-like flooring. After another minute, she retreated to her pod, a queasy feeling in her stomach.

  It had been decades since she’d so much as coughed or sneezed without intending to.

  Something was wrong here.

  Voril breathed in her pod until the queasy feeling was gone. Then she looked up the manager who’d blue-beamed Milwaukee. She stared at the name; it was redacted, just like every blue-beamed manager’s name she’d ever seen. But that didn’t matter. During her search, she’d seen enough about the Whole New World dungeon to learn what she needed to learn.

  She knew the manager who’d developed it. He’d been a good engineer; he’d done the work on it himself instead of outsourcing it to any Charge user he could find. In fact, he’d insisted on it.

  Phinran. That’d been his name. Phinran. His own world had been a Tier Six, just like this one. It hadn’t survived, but he’d been promising, along with the few others who had survived Integration. Voril tried to remember which world it had been, which region she’d been responsible for—anything. Nothing. It was like a blank space in her mind. She’d long since stopped remembering the details of her jobs. Instead, she focused on the broad strokes and similarities—the constants that made Integration work, instead of the variables that were all but inconsequential.

  She pushed the renewed queasiness down and got her meditation pod moving north. Hal Riley was heading for the next region, and as far as she knew, that one had successfully acquired a Waypoint Beacon. Voril still hadn’t decided what to do with Hal Riley, but nothing else Museumtown was trying seemed to be working so far, and his class—not to mention his decisions with it—were interesting enough to ward off a full blue-beam.

  Besides, Voril needed to learn more about the dungeon collapse she’d just watched, and the Whole New World dungeon wouldn’t be telling anyone anything. Its monitoring systems were gone—and so was any record of what had happened inside. Until the Consortium could uncover its black files after Integration wrapped up, there was only one person who might understand.

  Hal Riley.